Warren Buffett's son Speaks out on Philanthropic giving

cepheus

The Charitable-Industrial Complex

By PETER BUFFETT

Often I hear people say, “if only they had what we have” (clean water, access to health products and free markets, better education, safer living conditions). Yes, these are all important. But no “charitable” (I hate that word) intervention can solve any of these issues. It can only kick the can down the road....

What we have is a crisis of imagination. Albert Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem with the same mind-set that created it.

Foundation dollars should be the best “risk capital” out there.
There are people working hard at showing examples of other ways to live in a functioning society that truly creates greater prosperity for all (and I don’t mean more people getting to have more stuff).

Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market

cepheus

Coincidentally I'm reading about a system called the International Clearing Union proposed by Keynes which sounds like exactly the sort of radical change Buffett is looking for. Fascinating stuff, the US scuppered it and made it into the IMF.

The International Clearing Union (ICU) was one of the institutions proposed to be set up at the 1944 United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire by British economist John Maynard Keynes. Its aim was to have been regulation of currency exchange, a role eventually taken by the International Monetary Fund (IMF)........

George Monbiot, a contemporary critic of the IMF, has argued that the ICU's proposed mechanisms would have given greater weight in decision-making to the less-developed countries, which were not then as heavily involved in international trade as they are now

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Clearing_Union